Gray Trace is a mechanic who lives with Asha’s wife in a nearby town. Although she works at Cobolt, one of the companies that has helped accelerate computer literacy, Gray chooses to stay out of this spectrum because she fears she will lose her humanity. One day, Gray asks Asha to help him return a restored car for a customer named Eron Keen, a famous technology innovator dealing with a rival Vessel company.
While visiting his house, Eron reveals his latest creation, an Artificial Intelligence chip called STEM, and he can serve as an auxiliary brain. On his way home, the Gray and Asha driver without a driver suffers a technical failure and stops on a field. Four unknown men arrive at the scene, shoot Asha and severely injure Gray’s back.
He looks helplessly how his wife bleeds to death in front of him. Gray returns home a few months later, being paralyzed and pinned in a wheelchair, being in the care of his mother, Pamela. The death of Ashei and Cortez’s incapacity, the detective appointed to deal with her case, to identify the attackers, made Gray plunge into depression. He is then visited by Eron who offers to implant the STEM chip into Gray’s column and thus to regain his motor functions. Gray accepts and the operation goes much better than they expected, until Gray discovers that Eron’s intentions were not as noble as they seemed at first glance.